I ‘m not actually interested in games. Not since I grew out of childhood Snakes-and-Ladders. I don’t mind playing a few games at Christmas, but it is the social interaction not the mental exercise which gives me pleasure. And contrary to what appears to be public opinion, I didn’t have my personality erased on the eve of my 70^th birthday. I never have been and I’m still not interested in games.

I do like learning languages, so I signed up to improve my German with Duolingo. I’m using the free version, so my sessions are punctuated with advertisements. That’s fair enough. They started with advertisements for clothes quite unsuitable for my age, but they now seem to have realised that I am an old woman so I keep getting adverts for brain-training. “Specially for Seniors”, they coo. “Keep your brain active”. “Prevent Memory Loss”.  Do the idiots not realise that learning a language is just as good exercise for your brain as playing silly games, with the added bonus that that you end up speaking it?

If I indulge myself with a copy of a weekend newspaper or a magazine, there is bound to be a section at the end with brain-training puzzles. If I’m sitting in my GP’s waiting room, if I’m sitting in an airport departure lounge, if I’m sitting on a bench waiting for a train, the people around me are no longer reading a good book or a magazine as they used to do. They are all staring at their smartphones playing puzzle games, for the good of their brains.

Sometimes it seems to me as if the entire middle-aged to elderly population of Britain is obsessed with the idea that if they don’t keep doing brain-training puzzles, they will inevitably develop Alzheimer’s. Am I the only person whose ageing brain is getting more than enough exercise trying to keep up with running my everyday life, using technology that is constantly changing and frequently malfunctions?

I have just had to buy a new laptop with Windows 11. I still haven’t figured out how to do all the things I did for years using Windows 10. Even worse, I spend a lot of time turning down offers to do things I don’t want to do at all. They pop up at odd moments all over the screen.

My banks are another rich source of brain-training. Some of them provide me with a paper certificate for the tax man if I go in and ask them. Some of them send me one online in a tiny format that I can’t read on my smartphone. I have to download it as a pdf, then take a screenshot of the pdf and email it to myself, save it, paste it into a word document and print it. I can just about manage to pay bills and transfer money using online banking, but anything more complicated means a trip into town to the local branch for some help, at least the first time I do it. If the bank closes that branch I shall have to change banks. Every so often they change the format in their app so I have to hunt all over for the bit I need. And banks keep on taking each other over.

I wanted to get into my account with my broadband provider. It displayed a message in one corner saying ‘BLOCKED’. I had to text my son to ask if this meant that someone had been trying to hack my account or whether it was probably just the website playing up. On another occasion Firefox blocked me from logging on to our local library’s website on the grounds that it was unsafe. Next day it was OK again!!!? I’m always horribly aware of the presence of hackers, scammers etc out there, just waiting for me to press the wrong button in an unwary moment, so this kind of thing really ups my stress levels.

And although my current electricity provider is the best I have ever had, my smart meter has been sending my bill in two halves, a week apart, for months. I have already written about the extensive research I had to do to understand how my smart meter worked.

Summer is not just a time for long sunny days in my garden. It’s the time for renewing my house and car insurance. I have to spend days carefully going through the documents emailed to me line by line to make sure that the person issuing them hasn’t made any typos that invalidate the insurance. Or made a mistake because they are new to the job and don't understand how to input some of the data onto their database. On one occasion I had to go to my garage and get them to telephone the insurance people and talk them through it. Yes, these things do happen. Remember that poor old lady who recently got prosecuted over a typo in her car insurance? My nightmares every year at renewal time are not unrealistic.

Train tickets, plane tickets, tickets for events all come online nowadays, and have to be downloaded to your smart phone so that a QR code or a bar code can be read at the entrance. Each one has to be downloaded in a slightly different way. I’m really surprised how well I have managed the recent examples – I didn’t need to scream for help. And I'm pretty good now at checking in for flights online, within the UK. When I tried to do it on a trip to Germany and they wanted me to include my passport photo, I had no idea how to do it and had to queue for hours at the airport.

The nearest person I can ask for help is 15 miles away in Kirkwall, at the computer shop. The only computer shop in the whole of Orkney. In the past, bills arrived by post, printed on paper. So long as you could read and write and do elementary arithmetic you could manage your household affairs. If there was something wrong with your bill you rang up. People complain nowadays about being kept hanging on in a 30-minute queue while the phone plays ghastly music to them. That’s after you have guessed which button to press in each of several sets to get to the department which will help you. Or not: the last time I tried ringing a company up I was answered by an AI which wasn’t working properly and kept sending me round in circles. In the past you didn’t have to navigate your way around a website that keeps changing its layout and periodically malfunctions, nor remember or store safely an infinite number of pin numbers and passwords. You didn’t have to have a smart phone so that you could do 2-factor authentication. I believe there is a way to do that without a smart phone but it sounds even more complicated. If I understood my friend's complaints right.

For those who are very familiar with modern technology, it is probably convenient to be able to pay your electricity bill on the train, or organise your house insurance during your coffee break. But I don’t suppose it is only the elderly who struggle constantly to deal with all this, lose money they can ill afford, and even end up in trouble with the law.

All in all, even though I never play the recommended games, I reckon my brain is getting enough training to keep it going even if I live to be a hundred and fifty years old.  Auf Wiedersehen!